I’ve been reflecting on how I let people perceive me.

My parents divorced when I was ten. My brother would walk from my dad’s apartment to meet his friends in my mom’s lobby so they could go to school together. All so they didn’t find out our parents had gotten divorced.

This was around the time I started struggling with anxiety and depression.

At ten, I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. After a few years of therapy and failed medication, my parents decided the support I had at home wasn’t enough.

When I was thirteen, my parents sent me to a wilderness therapy camp in North Carolina.

For three months, I trekked through the rainy Blue Ridge Mountains with a group of young girls that I would come to call family. Instead of graduating from middle school, my days were spent building fires, hiking, setting up camp, and hanging my food in trees.

For most of my teen years, I was passed from one program to the next, shipped across the coasts as different professionals took their shot at fixing me. 

I left my last program at 18 years old, and I’ve spent the years since trying to bury this part of my life. 

My story works in most situations. People tend to stop prying after I weasel my way out of their questions. They often assume I went to some pretentious East Coast boarding school, and I let them. 

If I told these lies enough times, I believed they would start to feel true, and those years would start to disappear.

But anyone who knows me knows I hate lying. 

I’m tired, and lying is miserable.

There have been countless moments where I’ve felt the urge to talk about my treatment, only to realize I have only a handful of people I can be honest with.

The other day, I learned that a girl I knew from my wilderness therapy program passed away. I tried calling a couple of friends from treatment, and when they didn’t pick up, I had no one to call. 

I spent the night crying on the floor of my kitchen. I was suddenly thirteen again, begging for a phone call with my parents or to be allowed to write to my friends back home. My chest hurt for this girl and her friends and family. I judge myself for making her death about me, but I couldn’t help thinking about how much I’d shut my friends out.

Concealing what I went through was intended as an act of strength. I believed it didn’t deserve to be talked about or occupy more of my life than it had already stolen. Instead, I’ve robbed myself of deeper relationships. I’ve kept even my closest friends from seeing all of me. 

I’ve thought a lot about what this means for my relationships. I always come back to the same idea— at some point, I have to say it. It will never feel like the right time, but I would have to do it regardless, hoping they understand not only my story, but why I’ve refrained from sharing it earlier.

I was too young when my brother hid our parents’ divorce to understand the need to control how others perceive me. But I understand now.

I don’t want to live that way anymore. I just want to be seen.

I thought I would be too paralyzed by fear to ever publish a piece like this. 

I’ve been waiting a long time. I have so much to tell you.

More soon.

– L